Field of the Invention
Embodiments relate generally to device recovery.
Background Art
In order to improve the speed, efficiency, and robustness of their networks, cable service providers are constantly engaged in various infrastructure upgrades and changes. However, in order to support these new changes and upgrades, configuration changes may sometimes be required at the client devices which access the networks. Depending on the particular change or upgrade, the client device may be inoperable until the new configuration is received. Additionally, from time to time, without any changes to a network, a client device may be in an error state that may be recoverable if the client device is reconfigured. However, typically, client devices may only receive configuration by requesting it. This usually happens at various stages of the initialization of the client devices. However, forcing the client devices to fully reinitialize in order to receive the new configuration changes has an associated disruption time where the client device is inoperable. For example, if the client device is a cable modem, the Internet may be unavailable while the cable modem is reinitializing. Additionally, while various recovery actions exist to cause a client device to reinitialize, they do not uniformly produce the same result when applied across the corpus of all cable modem makes and models. Therefore, what is needed is an assisted device recovery system that minimizes disruption to service yet successfully recovers client devices when they are inoperable.